In the realm of system and software operation and development, it is sometimes useful to monitor applications during operation. Software applications, computer programs, software subroutines, software modules, or software components (hereinafter referred to as applications) may write intermediate information to internal variables which are not output by the application. Because the content of these intermediate variables is not output, the content of these variables is not generally accessible to testers or other programs. For this reason, it may be difficult, for example, to debug applications operating erroneously without sufficient understanding of these intermediate variables or stages of processing of the application. Monitoring applications and these intermediate variables may be warranted for a number of other reasons.